Boot legacy PCs from NVMe storage: YouTube video with ThinkPad T43
This project allows old x86 computers using a classic BIOS to boot from modern NVMe storage attached via PCI(e). It's a heavily modified version of iPXE (which usually allows for booting from the network), but instead of the network, this code uses a port of the SeaBIOS NVMe implementation to talk to a local NVMe drive.
Works™
Very little fault tolerance and testing on different devices.
- IBM ThinkPad T43
- QEMU VM, i440fx
- Samsung SSD 980
- Corsair Force MP510
- Booting from NVMe storage in Legacy/BIOS mode
- Works on 32bit-only CPUs (Pentium 3, Atom, etc.)
- Option ROM, USB flash drive, SD card, CD-ROM, chainloading (e.g. from grub) booting supported
- Write support is currently disabled. The code is present, but it's additional danger for no benefit (for my usecase)
- Only 1 NVMe drive (with 1 namespace) is properly handled at the moment
- 64bit BARs are probably not handled correctly (untested!)
There are 2 other Option ROMs publicly available:
- Samsung 950 Pro (exposed by the PCIe device, device-specific)
- community modded VMWare NVMe ROM (didn't work on my hardware, did work in QEMU)
This project is GPL-licensed, can be freely redistributed (both as binaries and source) and can be instrumented/debugged easily (as it's written in C).